This past ten days or so I can tell something's not quite right with how everything is flowing through my body. I'm trying to more or less carefully eat my way out of it by choosing food.

I'm enjoying my new MacBook Pro (thankfully, given what it cost). It's a very different sort of environment: I've been using Linux and FreeBSD for years and years and years, and they appeal to me because of their rawness, the quick tools I've had to write to make them usable, the way my technical knowledge gives me power. The Mac definitely blocks that impulse, as technical knowledge, beyond being difficult to find, doesn't let you customize the environment much, and so doesn't seem to give nearly so much power. It's a realm where everything JFWs (Just F*cking Works), until it doesn't, and then you may just be up a creek. I knew that coming in, though, and I didn't buy this with the expectation that it would replace my Linux usage: I bought it to make music and deal with media, and have a laptop I could truck around that actually has working wireless and other shiny features. I think it'll be great for that. Yesterday I bought a USB-MIDI interface and plugged in my keyboard and started playing with GarageBand, the free music software; either it's a lot more limited than I thought, or I'm a lot worse at computer music than I thought, but I'm determined to get what I can out of it before I buy something more exotic and expensive like Ableton Live.

I got to go for an hour-long flight around the Bay late tonight, including several 360s around San Francisco Airport (SFO) and over the Financial District skyscrapers. Apparently with SFO you can't normally ask to hang around, because obviously there's traffic, and I guess there are code words you can say to the controllers and they'll grudgingly give you permission for one or two go-rounds. We caught them at a slack time, around 11pm, and they must have been in a good mood, since they told us to just go as many times as we wanted. Pretty to see everything with all the lights.